“Bye, Uncle Jake!” the kids yell, waving.
Before Jake can say anything else, Hall shuts the front door on him. “He’s not bad with a sword, but if you want to see somethingreallyimpressive, watch this.” He brings out a collapsible top hat, taps the brim with his plastic magic wand, and then a real rabbit jumps from inside it. “Here, you can keep this,” he tells Octavian, who is instantly told by three adultsYou’re not keeping that.
“Where’d you get that rabbit?” Athena demands.
Hall flourishes the magic wand, doing jazz hands. “With my very real magic wand.”
I poke him in the stomach. “You told me you can’t magic things to life. Where’d you get that rabbit?”
“A magician never tells.” He shoos me away.
Hall behaves erratically all afternoon. I overhear him asking Mom what her favorite brand of lemonade powder is and happily complaining to Athena about traffic. (Just traffic as a concept.) He asks my nieces and nephews if they’ve “heard any hot goss lately.” I discover two orange road cones in the truck bed, which I’m fairly certain he stole.
I don’t know what to make of it.
Hall slips off while I’m wrestling the swords away from two excited nephews. I check the bedroom, the purple guest bath, the tower. I duck behind palm trees and the stack of presents that’s begun to accumulate in the living room. “Has anyone seen—”
My attention lands on the yellow bench that’s usually flush against the basement door, and which is now pushed outward. Ahh.
He’s gone to visit Little Teller City.
When I was around ten, Grandpa went through a phase in which he obsessively built a child-size village in his basement, working on it night and day for the better part of a year. Every time we visited, he was down in that basement, door locked, drilling and painting and injuring himself a good bit. “You don’t have the knees for cobblestones, you old goat!” Grandma would yell down.
The grand reveal was thrilling. We made a special trip out for it, the first visitors to Little Teller City. He’d recycled a few props from movie sets, as he used to be a set designer and still had a few connections. The winding street, paved with real cobblestones, is named Bettie Boulevard. (“That’s not after you, it’s after Grandma,” Athena told me, in case I got any ideas.) There’s Rocky Road Ice Cream Parlor with fake ice cream scoops and a cash register that dings, Mountain Express Post Office where you can dress up with mail bags. A milk bottle delivery service. Old-fashioned bicycles with baskets on the front. Gold Rush Bookshop.Teller City Market with its miniature shopping carts and The Little Red Schoolhouse, with four desks for the grandkids.
Grandpa followed us from one area to another, pointing out any cool details we might have missed. It was delightful, a tiny town all to ourselves. My siblings and I bossed each other, fighting over who got to deliver mail, who got to be the teacher, who had to work at Gold Rush Bookshop (it was the smallest building packed mostly with books from the ’80s that made you sneeze when you turned their pages). Teller City Market was the clear favorite. It was the only building that could comfortably fit all four of us at once, and the fake food was so high quality we agreed we could probably trick our parents into thinking it was real. Little Teller City ends in a painted mountainscape, a rather slapdash mural of flowers and sky—by that point in creating the town, Grandpa was burned out and wanted it to be done.
I step carefully down the steep cement stairs, cool air wafting up to greet me. Above, the dryer hums, vibrating the exposed beams. Grandpa had meant to install a realistic sky on the ceiling, but building this place took ten years off his life and he couldn’t bring himself to lift a paint roller one more time. Hiring somebody else to do it was out of the question. Lawrence Watson would rather raze this basement to ash than let another man lay his incompetent mitts on it.
Our interest wore off after a couple of years, largely because there are no televisions in the Mayberry-esque time capsule. I haven’t been down here in a good while, so I expected cobwebs (the great-grandkids aren’t allowed in the basement because they “don’t appreciate it enough”) and dust. Maybe I’d crawl into the market and reflect on ye olden days, in which I was small enough to fit properly, and how Dad was a good enough sport to playalong, pretending to be fooled by our plastic cheeseburgers. How the bite marks he left in them made us fall over with laughter.
But I see that the market, extraordinarily, has grown right along with me into adulthood.
Every building on Bettie Boulevard has sized up to accommodate a grown-up or two, ceiling pushed skyward a few extra feet. Teller City Market bears a wreath on the door. A model train whistles as it chugs around its tracks within the display window of Frontier Hardware. The bicycles are now red pickup trucks with chopped trees sticking out the backs, boughs still thick with snow. There are soft Christmas lights strung from every surface, arching rooftop to rooftop over the cobblestone street, which has acquired a dusting of white fluff.
Near the end of the lane, a familiar shape is busy etching frost onto the glass door of the Blue Moose Café, perfecting each frozen snowflake by hand. His back is turned to me as he hums, lost in his work.
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas down here,” I observe, sliding my hands into my pockets.
Hall jumps. Whirls. “Ahh! Bettie!” It’s like I’ve caught him with an adult magazine. He fidgets, the apples of his cheeks glowing.
“So. This is where all the stuff from upstairs went, hm?”
“You weren’t supposed to see it.”
“Why, is it a surprise?”
His jaw tightens, an unspokenno. Interesting. I step forward, ignoring his obvious distress at my presence. “Grandpa’s going to have a cow.”
“He won’t know. It doesn’t look like this when I’m not here... I change it all back whenever I go upstairs.”
“When did you start sneaking down here to change the village?”
“Three thirty this morning. I’ve been up and down all day.”
I watch him shrewdly. “Why?”
He lifts a shoulder, then lets it drop.
